Seventy years ago this month, Picasso, irate over the bombing of a small village (Guernica) in northern Spain by fascist forces, presented his Guernica at the 1937 World Fair in Paris. It has been referred to as the most famous painting of the 20th century and the greatest of all political art. I would agree that the painting is, indeed, masterful. But as social commentary, the painting simply fails and it fails because it does not, and maybe it cannot, pass on to us the important story – that we can learn from especially as artists – of what happened in Guernica, the small northern village in Spain, or more generally what the Spanish Civil War was all about.[i]

A Famous Painting But Why?

First of all the painting itself is huge.[ii] I also believe that the use of only black, white, and grey helps give the painting a wonderful harmony. The layering of objects creates space. There is a sense of chaotic movement and yet there is balance. The innovative use of flat, Picasso-styled figures is effective in portraying some kind of horror, or fighting, or terror. But what exactly is going on or what the point is, is unclear. John Berger, the late art critic, argues that while Guernica makes no reference whatsoever to the issues involved in the Spanish Civil War or Guernica itself, “…the work is a protest — and one would know this even if one knew nothing of its history.”[iii] I’m not so sure. The painting was once shown to an actual survivor of the bombing of Guernica and she was simply flummoxed, not knowing what to make of it. Scholars confidently, and it seems rather hopefully, project their own suppositions: the light bulb, for example, is symbolic of the sun, says one. No, it is the one and only reference to modernity, says another. No says a third, it is symbolic of a bomb. Tom Wolfe, the novelist, said the painting looks like a horse choking on a banana.

The power of the painting, and its fame, derives largely, I believe, from the fact that the most famous painter in the world and a Spaniard, presented the work at a world’s fair in 1937 as an in-your-face rebuke of a Spanish and fascist general (Franco) while fascist forces, not only bombed Guernica, but were in the process of taking over Germany and Italy. As a standalone piece, its messaging is problematic, to say the least. Okay, call it a protest. That could fit. But it reminds me of a very good sculptor friend who once welded a pistol to the top of a helmet. Whenever there was an exhibition that was framed as political, out came the helmet. If one needs a painting backdrop for an anti-war action or yes, a protest of some kind of violence, Guernica will do fine. But what we as artists might learn from the Spanish Civil War and Guernica in particular remains utterly and painfully obscure.

Self-Management and Democratic Uprisings by Artists

If artists bristle at one thing, it is someone other than themselves having control over their work. The history of resistance by artists leading up to Impressionist independence provides a good example. French artists spontaneously formed assemblies and pushed for control over their work, or “self-management,” not only in the French revolution itself (1789) but in the revolutionary periods of 1830 and 1848 as well. By 1870 in Paris, the “overall picture…[was] of a classic revolutionary crisis of rising expectations: demands for artistic self-government and democratic freedoms….”[iv] In the spring of 1871 Paris experienced a singular democratic uprising that reverberates to this day; for three months Paris was taken over by rebellious workers along with a 400-member strong Federation of Artes led, in part, by Gustave Courbet, “voicing a program for radical change in artistic self-government, education, patronage, production and museum curatorship.” This moment of full (not just political but economic too) democracy was eventually and viciously crushed by French national authorities during a week dubbed “Bloody Week,” where somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000 French revolutionaries slaughtered in the streets of Paris.[v]

By 1874, with martial law still in place, a determined band of artists continued the rebellion against the control of elite-managed Salon. They formed their own system of self-management as painters and also enjoyed a direct relation with the public. These artists were, of course, the Impressionists, whose organizational statutes “were drawn up with the crucial assistance of four of the central figures of the Federation” that were part of the Paris Commune.[vi]

The Democratic Uprising and Push for Self-Management in Spain

Depression level poverty along with obvious and obscene levels of corruption during the early part of 20th century Spain was met, by the mid-1930’s, with a spontaneous, nation-wide, democratic uprising. But the rebels, mostly peasants and workers, weren’t simply pushing for adequate representation within a parliamentary democracy. Their objective went much further. They wanted control over their work. In other words, it was a total social revolution. George Orwell, who volunteered to fight alongside the rebels, wrote:

Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the boot blacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said “Señor” or “Don” or even “Usted”; everyone called everyone else comrade and “Thou,” and said “Salud” instead of “Buenos dias…. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.[vii]

According to one observer, the revolution was “the greatest experiment in worker self-management Western Europe has ever seen.”[viii] And who was opposed to self-management? The answer is that the experiment in self-management was opposed by large industrialists and landowners, including the Catholic Church and, generally, “by every one of the world powers,”[ix] which is to say centers of power that required hierarchy, domination, and centralized control: the fascists, the communists, and the western democracies including the United States.[x] And why was Guernica chosen as the place to bomb? Because Guernica in 1937 was a Basque village that symbolized this particular kind of independence, this particular glorious triumph of ordinary human beings, unbossed, working together in a kind of spiritual drunkenness.

I find it rather revealing that despite all the hoopla over the painting the story of the movement for self-management, its significance, and its bloody eradication is simply censored out of art history by omission, not unlike the story of Impressionism and its relation to the Paris Commune. That Guernica is a general but vague protest, while probably true, inadvertently continues that censorship. The result is that painters today are not likely to know their own history regarding self-management nor are they likely to be on guard against institutional mechanisms that like the elite-managed Salon of old promote one type of art to the exclusion of nearly all others.[xi]

Joachim Pissarro, the great-grandson of Camille, said of Camille Pissarro’s work that while it did not “carry a revolutionary message, it performed a revolutionary function.” And that is because Camille Pissarro insisted on responding to visual sensations with absolute independence. If we are to find a way out of our own “maquis” – a thicket of dense shrubbery or maze, as Matisse suggested artists must do, then complete independence or self-management is required. To make available to the rest of humanity the same opportunity to find a way out of their own maquis is to perform a revolutionary function. The people of Guernica understood this. People within the centers of power that crushed the movement understood it as well. But those who sing the praise of the profundity of Guernica as social commentary do not.

NOTE: For those of you who do not receive our newsletter, you might be interested in watching my latest painting on the same theme YouTube video (2.5 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo5dioVGEaI or if that page doesn’t come up, search for “The Need for Self-Direction and Independence in Painting” at YouTube.

[i] The inability of any painting to communicate clearly any social commentary of substance may be generalized: visual art as social commentary requires words, and many of them, if it is to communicate a message that moves beyond the level of simple truism. Don’t get me wrong, for protest actions in need of posters and rallying cries, and simple messaging this may be enough given the context that an action provides. For example, in the sanitation worker’s strike in Memphis in 1968 (which drew in MLK in what turned out to be his last action), the placard that read “I AM A MAN” was sufficient and powerfully effective, as is the current movement message of “BLACK LIVES MATTER.”

[xi] It is common now for artists, luxury fashion, and museums to collaborate, not to mention sculptors like Jeff Koons or investor-sponsored artists like Damien Hearst. http://bit.ly/2rPthkp

On the other hand if you were to think of a visual art form that advances self-management, it would be easel painting. It is not surprising, then, that easel painters are considered rather anachronistic, despite broad public and market appeal, or that the teaching of traditional painting has virtually been eliminated as a professional option in universities.

A group of Renoir “haters” protested in front of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts the other day.[1] The general thrust of the protest it seems was, simply, that “Renoir Sucks At Painting.” Above is a painting by Renoir. Value and color relationships are spot on. There is a wholeness, a harmony, a wonderful sensitivity to atmosphere. The brushwork is vigorous, fresh, and authoritative. But here is the key thing: Renoir was painting this when artists such as Meissonier (the painter of slick – or “licked” according to certain Impressionists – propaganda pieces) were winning medals by the cart load. He, Renoir, was just 28; and yet he had the capacity, the courage really, to allow us to see and feel how nature was touching him. He must have been intensely alive.

Let’s hold that thought – about being intensely alive. We all know that good painting is not just about technical virtuosity. I believe that good paintings are those that genuinely move people in unexpected ways and this, in turn, requires that the painter be moved in ways that most people are not, that liberate us in some way. It is in this realm of painting, of feeling intensely alive, that I think Renoir may have something to teach us. First, a slight detour is in order.

Are you familiar with George Carlin, the comedian? Well, by about the year 2000 he was a social critic –savagely so, I would say, and at least to me, very funny. If you don’t know him, you’ll have to google him, but trust me, he wasn’t what you would call “mainstream.” However, when he was in his late 20s (about the same age as the Renoir above), he had hit the big time. He was doing the late shows, first Jack Paar and then Johnny Carson, just as those shows were becoming big in the 50s and 60s. And when he hit the big time, George Carlin was, what we might call, “really straight.” In other words, he hadn’t found himself yet. Eventually he made the decision to dump the “success” that he had achieved because the real success would be (and I use this phrase all the time, I know!) for him to become who he was most. Okay, back to Renoir and company.

By the time Renoir was 28, he had exhibited in 4 Salon exhibitions. What Parisian artist wouldn’t kill to be at that level in 1869? But Renoir and the other “intransigents,” while they could have focused strictly on making it within the institutions they had inherited, painted what Salon jurors were looking for, and served the interests of the powerful, they didn’t. They threw away their careers so that they could find, not medals, fame, and wealth, but fulfillment in feeling larger, more powerful, more beautiful (to paraphrase Emma Goldman) in becoming who they were most. That’s painting!

Now, allow me to frame this more tightly. As anyone trying to make a living today as a painter, I investigate various “opportunities” and marketing gambits. Oh my god, they are so depressing. For example: one I was looking at just today uses language like “make your dreams come true…learn, grow, and improve….” Not bad, I’m thinking. I could go for that. Then they spell out what “learn, grow, and improve” means to them: you will be able to “secure your first major client contract, convert more visitors into sales on your website, launch your next product and make 5 times as much revenue as you did in the previous quarter….” But wait, there’s more: “Go on a round-the-world trip while running your business.” That’s the freaking Jack Parr show! I don’t want it. I want to be who I am most as a painter. I’m not interested in empire building, even if I can go on a world trip while my elves crank out the product.

Okay, now here’s where Renoir can teach us something: he confronted the same dilemma we all face and Renoir and his group came up with a solution, the only group of artists in the history of the world to do so. They took control over their process (of making paintings) away from the art elites of their day and they largely took control of the distribution of their work as well. They created a way of painting and exhibiting that enabled them to become completely independent. They were free, and poor for a time, but they turned the tables on those above them. They got control of the goose that laid the golden egg. Now, they were painters with a capital P! Sigh! This amazing historical achievement was not to last.

Fast Forward: Artists in the Age of Finance Capital

“There’s been a seismic shift in the past 10 to 15 years,” notes Tom Eccles, executive director of the curatorial studies program at Bard College. “Art is seen today as an equal asset class to stocks, boats, houses and jewelry, and people don’t want to give their assets away.”[2] Of course they don’t, not in a world where American corporations sit on $1.4 trillion dollars in cash and where the main source of profit in the American economy is asset price inflation.[3] In fact, the new “masters of the universe” are art masters, buying (and buying control over) and manipulating every aspect of an unregulated system of art production, marketing, and distribution:

Hedge-fund managers, who play a vital but disruptive role in the broader financial markets, are increasingly throwing their weight around the art market: They are paying record sums to drive up values for their favorite artists, dumping artists who don’t pay off and offsetting their heavy wagers on untested contemporary art by buying the reliable antiquity or two. Aggressive, efficient and armed with up-to-the-minute market intelligence supplied by well-paid art advisers, these collectors are shaking up the way business gets done in the genteel art world…. Nearly all are applying their day-job tactics to their art shopping, dealers say.[4]

So welcome to 2015. This is the institutional setting that we painters inherit. This is where we are. We could go the Jack Paar route: we could lock into the logic of the entrepreneur, focus on the latest ways of self-promotion, and, to paraphrase Robert Hughes, chase after external rewards with the voracious single-mindedness of a feeding bluefish. But then painting would be reduced largely to a process of production. More and more of our energy would be spent in self-promotion. We would start thinking about things like productivity. And our self-worth would be linked to all the external measures – sales, expert endorsements, prized exhibitions, and all the rest. Given that only a few are going to be anointed as “blue chip,” our sense of self will sink to whatever marketing level we reach. And we will believe that it is all legitimate. It’s just. It’s how the world works. How dreadful is that?

Let’s go back to what a real painter can teach us. Let’s go back to the disobedience of Renoir and the members of his group who proudly stated, quite explicitly actually, “I know my self-worth.” Of course they were concerned about sales. They thought about it all the time, but they refused to be defined in terms of some larger power system, some set of economic interests not their own. Renoir and company thought that if you really want to be a painter you need to have the freedom to be self-defining. To be honest, I really don’t have the energy to get that big client contract. I know that if I want to grow as a painter I have to really buckle down and keep right in front of my mind, night and day, the idea that my first need is to enjoy the exercise of my own power for its own sake. I can’t be the person who is consumed by trying to get 5 times more sales this quarter than last. I’d rather dig ditches. Sorry! I have all I can do to understand and then practice what Baudelaire urged Renoir to value, “the presentness of the present.” I don’t want a world trip while the elves crank out – whatever. I want to stand on the shores of Lake Como and try to see beyond those obvious colors again. I want to stand before nature, with brush in hand “vibrating with nature” as Cèzanne did, trying to do the impossible as Monet did, or as Mallarmè counseled Renoir and Morisot to do, and that is to get a thrill by embracing “the untouched alive now.”[5]

If Renoir sucked at painting, he at least found fulfillment in a process where both visual sensation and feeling came together. He once recalled, apparently fondly, his slow, somewhat painful process of becoming who he was most as “a gentle madness.” I suspect that the discovery of his ability to create himself through the expressive activity of painting was, for him, fulfilling. I also think that it is precisely that fulfillment that very well may be the measure of what it means to be a free human being.

So why would I be so foolish as to give up the chance to be who I am most or the rush of being carried to some new magical place when I finally connect in order to win some kind of market-directed success, my mind divided from my hands, and my time easily gobbled up by the endless and intense efforts to get the attention of people who have assumed the role of experts but who have never painted in their lives?

Here’s what I get from Renoir: first, paint, express who you are, think deeply about painting, get as good as you can, and then paint some more. I like to tell the story of when I first tried plein-air painting. I brought my little 8x10s back to show my teacher. He said, “I’m glad to see that you are going out. Now, after you do two or three hundred of these, go on to 9×12.”

I don’t know. I think Renoir did some really good work. Maybe those haters out there ought to go out and do two or three hundred little paintings en plein-air and feel the rush of exercising their own power. I bet they would change their minds. Who knows? They might even become disobedient and protest outside of universities and demand that art departments teach something about serious painting.

Wolf Kahn once told me that an artist must always be trying to solve a problem. Other well known artists have said the same thing this way: once you get good at something, stop and push past whatever it is that you do easily and well. It’s a nice idea. The notion keeps us from getting into ruts, even lucrative ruts that drive careers. The emphasis is not on product but on growth, on becoming more.

My “problem” as it were is that I have competing and somewhat conflictual interests: I love the very late Monet paintings that are symphonies of virtuosity, tangles of overt brushstrokes that make Pollock’s drip paintings look soulless and formulaic. On the other hand, I love work, like the flat abstraction of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series, that are virtually without brush strokes at all, except that there are those wonderful layers of inspired scumbling that make the artist visible just the same. Diebenkorn covered a lot of ground, as most of you know, and it is his contribution, along with such artists as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, James Weeks – and later Nathan Olivera and Manuel Neri – as Bay Area Figurative artist that really help provide me a direction. In their work one can find that powerful blend of simplicity, verve, and sensuality that seems to marry abstraction and three dimensional space.

If there were a contemporary generation to the Bay Area Figurative movement, which first emerged in the 50s and 60s, I would nominate Kim Frohsin for inclusion. She might resist such a categorization but her work, at any rate, also helps me think about “my problem.”

The two images above (mixed media: on the left: ink, stabilo pencil, gouache, paper; and on the right: stabilo pencil, ink, watercolor crayon, paper) are representative of Kim’s aesthetic. As with many of her figure drawings, one can see that she has reduced everything to three values (dark, middle, and light) with the paper left open as the light. Notice also how non-literal everything is. The right foot of the figure on the left, for example, isn’t drawn as a “foot;” rather it is a dark that melts into the cast shadow. Notice, too, how the floor/background becomes a variety of subtle color, not calculated but discovered, that at the same time provides a tonality in which the figure is located. The figure on the right reminds me of Kahn’s criticism of my own work: “your work isn’t messy enough.” Kim’s is messy just right: it seems to be the by-product of a visual exploration, one that suggests that she isn’t looking for results so much as she works, but rather is immersed in a sensual rush that perculates as she converses with what she sees. She not only seems to be exploring but finding, finding bits and pieces, splats and scratches that lie beyond the facts. This, to me, is the mark of a serious artist. The subject is not the figure in the end. The figure was just the prompt, the point of departure. The subject is always Kim.

Check out her website (http://kimfrohsin.com). Look at the way she treats bread and lemons. Notice that her choice of subject (tea bags and fortune cookies) has zip to do with some inherent beauty and everything to do with what she sees and feels visually. Her “airplane” series (as in paper airplanes!) reveals that extraordinary capacity to make visual poetry out of practically nothing (much in the way Diebenkorn could paint a pair of scissors on a table and convey greater depth and mystery than a Renaissance painter’s pieta).

When I lived in San Francisco, I knew Kim. Her work was impressive then. But I had not been aware of what she has been doing this past decade so it was a delight to spend some time with her website and realize that her work speaks to me even more these days.

Kahn was right. I need to get messier. Kim seems to be admonishing me as well: keep things simple. Paint things that most everyone else walks by. Let the struggle show. Nothing like a good problem to keep the whole thing moving forward.

One can get a sense of the direction painting has taken by comparing early 20th century artists Marcel Duchamp, born in France, with Robert Brackman, born in the Ukraine. (Brackman, as many of you know, immigrated to the US and was my teacher’s teacher.) A story I often tell of Brackman, through whom our method passes, is that he spent seven years doing nothing but underpaintings. A serious student was he to be sure. Duchamp, we are told, essentially became bored with painting, preferred applying himself to chess, but not before he decided, in effect, to play games with the art cognoscenti, of whom he was the proverbial darling and advisor. Duchamp, as you know, contributed to human achievement in art by exhibiting such “ready-mades” as the snow shovel (exactly like the one you would buy in a store) and, perhaps more famously, an ordinary urinal, dubbed The Fountain in 1917.

Duchamp Brackman

Art, as various agents and critics have reminded us, must be incomprehensible to the average Joe in order that it confer the status of intelligentsia onto those in the know and pay dividends to those willing and able to pay hard cold cash for historically significant art pieces, like The Fountain. (Is anyone noticing the circularity here?) Thus in 1998, Mike Bilbo, perhaps best described as an entrepreneurial artist, drew 4,000 versions of Duchamp’s famous urinal and sold $100,000 worth of his drawings. “Rocketing prices for replicas, editions and even the most fleeting ephemeral trace of Marcel Duchamp reached a pinnacle of absurdity,” noted art historian Alice Goldfarb Marquis, “with the sale of a replica of The Fountain from an edition of eight, at Sotherby’s in November 1999, for 1.7 million dollars.”[1]

Duchamp, as either genius or pawn, remains a central figure in 20th century visual art. Again Marquis: “Duchamp opened the door – even the museum door – to art featuring feces, urine, and other bodily fluids; to art based on junk recovered from the city dump; to art involving cadavers and maggots; and to art with aggressively sexual themes. Artists who display their own naked or provocatively clothed bodies may also point to Duchamp. In short, the avant-garde art of the late twentieth century flaunts impropriety, defiance, messiness, and snickering disdain for the vast majority of museum-goers.” [2]

While I greatly admire Brackman’s work, it doesn’t “send” me. His subject matter and compositions seem too traditional, even old fashion in a way. More importantly for my taste, he carried his paintings too far. They appear too finished. This is especially true if one only sees his work through old reproductions. However, I have seen his work in person and in person one can feel the emotion that his complexity of color and finesse of line exude. His sense of tonality is positively haunting especially in his pastel drawings, as in the one above. And I have seen work of his that was “unfinished,” where the verve or “glamour,” as he would call it, jumps off the canvas. When he was 86 a student said to him that he (the student) noticed more color in his work; Brackman’s response was that this was because he (at 86) was beginning to see more color. No clever stunts. No success by scandal. And, a bored painter he was not.

One of his greatest strengths was also that of an inspiring teacher. Like Robert Henri, with whom he studied, he understood the painting process as well as the spirit of art and used concision, drama, and wit to get students to understand. I used to hear my teacher recount endless studio stories that both informed and made you laugh. This one, which is more about Brackman’s temperament, is instructive nonetheless:

One morning Brackman received a call in his Connecticut studio. “Hello, Mr. Brackman. I’m Peter Worthington. You may not remember me but I studied with you many years ago. And I have a favor to ask – and, of course, I will be happy to compensate you for your time.”

“You see,” Worthington continued, “I’ve just been appointed first violinist of the Boston Symphony and tonight my friends are throwing me a party. And I was thinking how interesting it would be if I could do a little still life of my violin and have it there as part of a musical tableau for tonight’s party. Now – I remember that you used to break the painting process down into stages and I was wondering if you could walk me through the stages, once more, over the phone.”

Brackman replied: “Well Mr. Worthington, in fact, I do remember you and it is so ironic that you should call at this very moment. You see, tonight my friends are also giving me a party and just before you called, I was thinking how nice it would be if by tonight I could play – oh, let’s see – Brahm’s Violin Concerto. Could you please walk me through that over the phone?”

“I don’t think that is very funny Mr. Brackman.”

“Neither do I.”

CLICK!!

I saw this diagram one time where the history of painting was presented as a tree with all these branches first emerging from a trunk and then from one another suggesting that one art movement begot another and so on. Duchamp was a major branch, of course, with all these smaller branches coming out of it. Interestingly, Brackman was considered important enough to be one of the branches too; but he was represented as one of the dead ends, a branch that virtually no one takes any more. Pretty accurate diagram, actually.

Robert Hughes is one of my favorite art critics. He’s Australian, and Americans might know him from his American Visions, which was a TV series on American art. In any case, he has written widely and is considered America’s most popular art critic. He has that wonderful trait of combining knowledge, wit, with the ability to turn a phrase. He also is that rare high art voice that sees through the pomposity of the privileged few who have the power to define what is considered important art. Notes Hughes:

The art market we have today did not pop up overnight. It was created by the great liquidity of late-twentieth-century wealth…But liquids do not flow where you want them to unless you dig channels, and this patient hydraulic effort has been, since 1960 at least, one of the wonders of cultural engineering. The big project of the art market [since then] has been to convince everyone that works of art, although they don’t bear interest, offer such dramatic and consistent capital gains along with the intangible pleasures of ownership…that they are worth investing large sums of money in. This creation of confidence…is the cultural artifact of the last half of the twentieth century, far more striking than any given painting or sculpture.

Translation: Very powerful and privileged people have engineered the art world for their own personal private gain and this in turn has required that a special class of art experts control the definition of art and thus keep the tastes and sensibilities of the larger public out of the game. As this class of educators has taught us all, art that might move us at first sight – ie, art that is immediately popular – can’t possibly be profound or important. Such art is, to use their words, too “accessible.” Art that flat out makes no sense or, better, if it offends, is of a much higher caliber: such art is difficult and challenging and it is investible precisely because it isonly knowable by elites. It is easy to see the circularity going on here, but it must be so; if the popular voice were given credence, the all-knowing art expert would be out of a job and the super wealthy would have to content themselves with investing in GE and have no fancy auctions to go to.

I think most people who have ever set sight on Michaelangelo’s David and felt immediately chills running up and down their spine know these pronouncements to be drivel. Or simply think jazz. Or Elvis. Or the Beattles. Ordinary people blew off the experts and got it right. Sadly, but not surprisingly, many young and ambitious artists are so career oriented that they swallow – hook, line, and sinker – the myth that the public is stupid and to be taken seriously they try mightily to make art that pisses people off. Succès de scandale! It’s really the only true measure of genius. If only, instead, youthful artists were taught a more honest history, namely that the source of innovation often lies in the spirit of resisting top-down direction, as exemplified by the Impressionists, the art world would be a far more congenial place. Certainly sincerity might have value. And the first line in Robert Henri’s book, “Art, when properly understood, is the province of every human being” might find its way emblazoned over the arches of art departments everywhere. I know: perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub.

Here’s a concrete example of top-down engineering that has impacted all of our lives. In 1965, a twenty-year old artist, Joseph Kosuth, made a photograph of a blown-up dictionary definition of the word chair and placed it on a chair. He considered this art piece to be “pure idea.” He also declared “painting to be dead” and argued that putting paint on canvas “would block the ability of any individual artist to really say anything.” Who cares, right? After all, I don’t think it would be too outlandish to suggest that unless you do something seriously for 10,000 hours (a figure that seems to have recently acquired some credibility), you really don’t know a hell of a lot about what you are doing. Now if Monet or Matisse or Sargent or Picasso had come up with a denunciation of painting in their mature years, we might pause to consider it. But a twenty-year old with practically zero painting hours under his belt? You’ve got to be kidding.

Nope. Such imbecilic pronouncements by malleable young artists provided and provide perfect fodder for the canons of the über rich and powerful who have sought and who continue to seek control over human creativity for their own material ends. Kosuth, along with others of his ilk, were anointed as a prescient avant-garde. Fast forward: the Kosuth chair photo was indeed, as it turned out, the beginning of the death of painting and the displacement of visual art by conceptual art (still considered visual, oddly enough). In higher education, painting is, for all intents and purposes, not taught. Now, the explanation as to why art and money cohered in precisely this way is beyond the scope of this blog. Suffice it to say that the disproportionate attention bestowed on Joseph Kosuth and others like him by the moneyed people had the desired result of recasting the art career, at least within visual art. Henceforth, visual artists would have to be Kosuth-rock-star type clones: pubescent, narcissistic, ambitious, and devoid of any real aptitude for things visual. Eliminated as well was the possibility of popular subversion, ie, beauty, the thrill, or the Wow! that every so often suddenly lifts the public out of its obedient boredom and into a disobedient and joyful mass hysteria. Alas, by the mid-70s, for example, every bodily fluid and disembowelment had been packaged in various ways and marketed as art that was difficult and challenging. You don’t get it, you say? Mission accomplished. The hired cognoscenti got it just fine as their authority melted into a friendly authoritarianism and as the world of visual art slipped irrevocably into the province of a powerful class of global investors and marketing firms. A more graceful coup d’état, with its myriad pillars of non-profits, chic, glitz and adoring intellectuals, would be hard to find.

Therefore, it is with great delight that I draw your attention to a Youtube video where Robert Hughes visits one such powerful art educator in his home, exposes him for the fool that he is and, I hope, helps everyone to understand the integrity and example of such artists as Cézanne who implored us to “trust our little sensations” and Monet, who said about the cognoscenti of his day: “They are all as stupid as one another. I know my worth.”